Social Insights Over Coffee & Ping-Pong: The Brandwatch Breakfast Highlights

Social insights, coffee, and ping-pong – doesn’t that sound like the perfect morning?

We thought so, so that’s why we decided to host a Brandwatch Breakfast at Bounce, Farringdon. The event focused on ‘speed to insights’ and, along with industry experts, we discussed how quick data collection is about more than just saving time. It’s also about solving problems, making new discoveries, and connecting teams across an enterprise.

Reducing time and solving problems

Nick Taylor, Product Marketing Manager at Brandwatch, set the scene for the morning. He highlighted how our latest product and feature releases have focused on making data collection and analysis not only faster but easier.

Recent Brandwatch releases include Unlimited Historical Data, The Dashboard Wizard and the Vizia 2 Platform – all of which are focused on improving ease of use and reducing time to insights.

Nick also touched on using social intelligence for new discoveries. Powered with the right tools, analysts now have the time and freedom to explore theories and uncover hidden findings.

The value of real-time market research

We had the pleasure of hosting a panel with our friends, Dr. Jillian Ney and Gareth Price from the Social Partners.

Both analyze data on a daily basis and understand the need for quick but accurate insights. We discussed how social data has changed the research industry and Jillian and Gareth identified key uses cases in their work.

Here are a few titbits that they shared with us:

On the pulse

Jillian explained how she uses Brandwatch to constantly be monitoring the pulse for her clients. She uses Dashboards as trackers that are ‘always there and always on’ with no time spent on set up each time she enters the platform. She can then add complexity through segmentation and building on Queries which not only cuts down on time but delivers a depth of insight.

Exploring conflicting hypotheses

We also touched on the flaws that surround social intelligence and research methods. Gareth highlighted that social data can easily yield results which are pointed towards a certain outcome but this does not always mean it is the correct result. Researchers should also look at conflicting hypotheses to validate results. He stated that with ‘Brandwatch being quicker and faster, you have more time to do this as well’.

Distributing insights across a global enterprise

After a quick break for a snack and a game of ping-pong, we were back in the mix with Unilever’s Ash Tapia. Ash is a ‎Digital Data Analytics Manager and provided us with some insight on how large brands use social data to drive campaigns on a global level.

Ash said that Unilever “use social listening as a base to get data which we can play with… and that informs real-time campaigns in multiple markets around the world simultaneously.” However, he pointed out that it’s important not to use this data in a silo but to blend the results with different data sets, such as sales numbers or weather forecasts.

Owning the narrative of the data story was also touched upon by Ash. He mentioned how important it was to get insights in front of the VPs without imposing an analyst bias. By using products such as Vizia 2, analysts are able to communicate findings to key stakeholders in different offices without the need for in-depth reports or multiple meetings. He also expressed how images and storytelling provoke emotions that can help to drive business decisions which you can’t convey with an Excel spreadsheet.

The next Brandwatch Breakfast

If you missed this Brandwatch Breakfast, don’t fear. We’ll be back in June with another edition.